eighth blackbird, Tuesday November 17

The University of Chicago programming entity, artspeaks, opened its 2009-10 season Tuesday of last week with a performance of Osvaldo Golijov's "Ayre," featuring Dawn Upshaw and the members of eighth blackbird (yes, I've not only confirmed, I've been admonished: it's all lowercase) in addition to a few other players that included Jeremy Flower (laptop and sound design = thumbs up) and Michael Ward-Bergeman, who in my opinion stole the show (more on him later).

Upshaw's coloratura has justly earned her a reputation as an angelic singer (figuratively in Handel and literally as the Angel in Messiaen's Saint Francis of Assisi). But this particular performance involved her doing a lot more than angelic coloratura; I wish I could remember verbatim Golijov's comment about what he had in mind for the piece -- it was something along the lines of "I got really sick of writing Dawn Upshawy kinds of music for Dawn Upshaw so I decided not to this time." Has anyone ever heard Dawn Upshaw not sing like Dawn Upshaw? That's kind of what we got on Tuesday. Dawn Upshaw sang 1. mic'ed (and with variable mic levels, so that you never knew just how loud she was going to sound) and 2. in chest voice. The piece rocked out in certain places (at which points, parts of the ensemble would stand up like a big, jazzy Argentinian klezmer band and rock out with her, a nice touch of staging) and the chest voice kinda worked. Kinda. But ultimately, if you want a singer who can sing loud and chesty, you wanna write for a singer who doesn't need to protect her voice. Dawn sounded great. But somebody with a little more Arethra would've brought the house down.

I promised to say something about Michael Ward-Bergeman, who plays something called the hyper-accordion. It's as cool as it sounds. (Michael is also the only person I know who's ever been referred to as an accordiopimp.) Check him out here.

Baby Bro Done Did It Again

A shout-out (isn't what the cool kids say?) to my brother, Drew Connery, is in order. I blogged about his radio exploits less than a year ago; now it seems he's poised to become famous overnight. (Can anyone say jealous older sister?)

Along with his singer pal, Tyg, with whom he's worked on several albums, Drew has just gotten himself signed to Dungeon (otherwise known as the label that signed Outkast).

Their music is available on iTunes (The album is called "I'm a Nightmare.")

Drew, I am sincerely proud.

University of Chicago Magazine article on Opera Cabal's "USW"

This article on my beloved project, Opera Cabal turned up yesterday on the University's main page -- I'm not sure how I feel about the picture :) But press is press. Is press.

In other news, we've managed to raise half of the money we need to take this very same piece to Oberlin in February. We'll finish it there, then move on to Chicago & New York to do shows at Curtiss Hall & Galapagos!

IMPROMPTU rides again...

The Mozartfragmentarypantomimereconstructionproject which I was recruited to direct for the Chicago Humanities Festival and which I've blogged about before appeared this past Monday at the University of Chicago Theater and Performance Studies Workshop . Minutes before the workshop kicked off we discovered 1. half the costumes were gone, including Jonathan DeSouza's entire costume and that 2. toenails (mine) react badly to being mowed over with pianos. Undeterred, this weekend we/the show travel/s to the American Musicological Society annual conference in Philadelphia to participate in its first year of experimental performance panels ... whoo hoo!

Anne LeBaron @ U of C

Anne LeBaron presented this past Friday to a (rather poorly -- yikes!) attended colloquium in Fulton Hall. The subject: her opera, Sucktion. LeBaron's work sounds immediately fascinating. Here's a random selection from her very impressive CV: she won a Guggenheim, studied with Ligeti (not in that order), has written a "dance opera" called Pope Joan, and Wet, another opera about the big business of water and the horrors of floods and she, I'm quoting, lectures at CalArts on the "concept of HyperOpera." (I don't know what this means but surely it is meant to address the hyper, erratic, overblown aspect of opera--aspect, or sine qua non--that is, the histrionic too-muchness of opera, perhaps in order to address what happens when the "Opera/Too-much" dial continues to be turned even further up, up, up?)

In the beginning of her lecture Anne charmed us by revealing a years-long fascination with old vacuum cleaners and vacuum cleaner sounds. She played us early samples of her work, female vocalizations layered on top of recorded & processed vacuum sounds. At times the two seemed uncannily to merge, and at one point, LeBaron had the vocalist spit and buzz into the vacuum mouthpiece to produce a series of fun sounds that would probably make Kaija Saariaho jealous. LeBaron's collaborators on Sucktion include the poet Douglas Kearney, whose libretto is a clever homage to Marinetti typeface. This all seemed promising.

LeBaron saved the nugget of her presentation for last -- that is, the semi-finished, workshop staging of the opera in L.A. But this is where things started to go downhill. LeBaron later mentioned she feared that 40 minutes of vacuum sounds weren't in and of themselves interesting enough to justify the ticket prices (okay, I made that part up, but she did say she was worried the vacuuming lacked moxy) so she crafted a heavy-handed scenario to go along with them. (For the record, vacuum sounds are TOTALLY interesting. Maybe not for forty minutes, sure, but for at least 25. If John Cage can get away with Points in Space, I say go for it!)

Oppressed housewife cleans house, anticipating the arrival of her husband home from work. (The singer/actress in this case was Asian, and one grad student floated the thought that LeBaron intended the opera as a critique of interracial marriage. Or better, I thought, that the Mail Order Bride phenomenon in this country replicates/updates in the 21st century the phenomenon of the overbored, undersexed housewife of the 1950s? But LeBaron seemed uninterested; or else this was my private flight of fancy. Anyway.)

The husband arrives home (a recorded voice-over, "Honey, I'm Home"; i.e. there is no "husband"), finds the place a mess & retires for the night. Depressed, the housewife turns melancholy. A vacuum arrives. A present from her hubby. She falls in love (with the vacuum), sprawls on it orgasmically and thus the comedy endeth.

To put it simply, the problem? Too much scenario and too literal.

1. Put the husband in a locked closet stage left so that the "housewife" (or is she a dominatrix? an updated Alcina?) controls his exits and entrances.

2. Or make it Erwartung Appliance! Instead of losing her fiancé, this poor woman is in denial over the death of her beloved vacuum.

3. Or make the husband's cleanliness phobia the center of the (o_p)/e(r?)a and his hapless wife the Mrs. Haversham of the Ace Hardware Cleaning aisle.

A dash of the intellectual wit that has made LeBaron such a successful composer and a writer is needed. Instead, the staging we saw consisted of the soprano (who, by the way, is a musicologist and member of the group that commissioned the opera) putting on and taking off rubber gloves, stuffing them into her oversize apron pockets, dropping them, and putting them on again. LeBaron's score, and her ideas, play happily far off of the beaten path. But this opera needs a director so that the curiosity that motivated its inception gets taken up a notch. Staging, to honor its points of origin (the ideation of the opera, the wit and spirit of adventurousness that composers like LeBaron bring to the table), should amplify, qualify & problematize that origin; not bow to it.

I think I might be famous...

... but I'm not sure. Does a photo in the Hyde Park Herald constitute arrival, recognition, everything I've been waiting for?

(Confirmation pending.)

Lucinda Childs at the MCA

I fell for it. No, I TOTALLY fell for it.

The MCA press for its Lucinda Childs show last weekend advertised not "Lucinda Childs Dance" or "Lucinda Childs, Adapted, Updated" but "Lucinda Childs." Period. And the only accompanying photo on their website is a lithe Lucinda Childs doing something extremely cool with her arms that I can't reproduce. (I tried.) I don't mean to accuse the MCA of false advertising, but they really had me: I thought, despite her being 70 years old, Lucinda Childs herself was going to walk up on the stage and dance. And come on: I'm not insane. Dancers age better than the rest of us. Look at frigging Baryshnikov! But I should have known. There's an age at which respectable artists of all stripes stop publishing photographs of their current selves and use the same one indefinitely. Lucinda looks a little too gorgeous in the photo to be 70. But then, who knows? It seemed to me at least plausible that if she were 70, and that picture had been snapped when she was 60 (it's a stretch, but not totally ridiculous) it might be the case that the show was not just a showcase of her work, but that Lucinda would appear in the flesh. And in a way she did.

"Dance" is a reconstruction commissioned by the Richard E. Fisher Center at Bard. The original piece (1979) comprises three 20-minute pieces with music by Philip Glass. Rather than simply reenacting the piece and having done with it, the creative team last weekend thought it would be a good idea to project a live recording of the original, 1979 version on top of the live dancers. A very, very thin scrim divided the audience from the stage making this possible. The video was rarely in sync with what was going on onstage and the projected dancers were also very, very large by comparison so that they dwarfed the live performers.

Childs' choreography Mickey Mouses Glass's music. (Translation: it's repetitive.) 20 minutes kinda crawls. The problem wasn't that the dance was boring. In fact, the video projected dance was riveting. If the MCA had shown an hour of the video only (by Sol LeWitt) I would have left, a happily paying customer. The problem was the discrepancy between the live and the video-projected dancers. On the video (which included a breathtaking solo dance by Lucinda for Lucinda), Childs' choreography worked. It was repetitive, but in a good way, because the ingenuity of the movements bear repeating. The dancers are poised on a giant grid, 12X12 squares. They skip along the grid at breakneck speed as though it were propelling them along. LeWitt's camera follows the dancers, making it seem as if they're actually hopping up and down in place on a moving sidewalk. The effect is a bit like Irish dancing, to use a terrible comparison -- the torso stays totally upright; the feet do all the work. Childs' facial expression in her own dancing is also unusual--rather than looking out at an imagined audience, she looks inward. She's doing this dance for herself and we're incredibly lucky to catch her in the act. I almost felt voyeuristic watching the video. But the live dancers on Friday dispensed with everything that made the original dancers so unearthly. Theses were rule-bound, balletic, posed. Less skittish, more robust, more effortful. They looked like they were trying very, very hard.

In case you'd rather hear it from someone who actually knows something about dance, read the Laura Molzahn review in the Trib.